How well did the Civil Service Blogger Code work – 18 months on?
Back on 11 March 2008, Tom Watson, then a Parliamentary Secretary at the Cabinet Office with a special interest in Digital Media, consulted on his blog to create a set of guidelines for Civil Servants who were active online. Tom’s original post is here – note especially the conversation in the comments.
The Civil Serf Incident
For newcomers, it will give you a bit of an idea about how blogs work to know that this came a few days after the “Civil Serf Incident”, when an anonymous blogger writing an unauthorised blog about frustrations with the civil service firstly hit the national papers, then deleted the blog (on 8-9 March 2008) to dodge the subsequent “investigation”. In a further blogger style act, Simon Dickson put an account of the incident back at the location from where the Civil Serf site had vanished, here.
Writing a Code from Below
There followed debate by a range of bloggers (samples 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), and subsequently the code appended to this article was published. Tom’s code was treated as an extension of the existing Civil Service Code specifically for the online environment. The approach was what I call “principles based” rather than “practice based” – in short, asking Civil Servants to “behave like this” rather than “do these things“. It would fit on a single sheet of paper, and was exactly 379 words long.
Social Media Code for Methodists
The reason I’m posting about this now is that the bodies which run the Methodist Church in the UK are creating a similar code for their employees, Methodist Ministers – of whom there are around 3000-3500, and members active online. The paper is quite long, consisting of a 9 page briefing, and about 10 pages of email guidelines plus 10 pages of “Social Media Guidelines”, and there’s a debate going on amongst Methodist Bloggers.
This debate has been triggered by Pete Philips, who blogs at Postmodern Bible, with contributions by – amongst others – connexions, Fat Prophet, Steve Jones, Big Circumstance and Methodist Preacher . I’ll aim blog about the Methodist process next week, but in short some people – and I agree with this approach – prefer a shorter document that follows the Civil Service approach.
Did the Civil Service Code work?
So I thought I would revisit the Civil Service Guidelines, and see whether they had been effective. I was interested to see whether a single page code had worked well across such a large and diverse organisation.
I spoke to someone concerned very closely with the creation of the Civil Service Guidelines. These were the key reflections about the Civil Service Code in use:
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There was no explosion, as some had expected, in the number of blogging Civil Servants, but a code published from the top was an important signal of validation for existing bloggers and those wanting to blog.
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In the Civil Service, an ingrained conservatism and conformist culture stretching back more than a century, and of “subordinates expecting to be told what to do” culture mitigated heavily against the use of Social Media.
- Implementing a Code as an extension of principles in the existing Civil Service Code – especially to be set in and start to transform an existing culture. This depends on the grain of the existing principles running in a direction which is recognisably similar to that of online media.
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The Guidelines for Online Participation could easily pass by those not directly involved. For the code to become recognised across the board, rather than being a useful protection and encouragement for a small number of individuals, it would need to be included within existing education/training channels, and also in the regime of “targets”.
Wrapping Up
Categories: All WW, Blog Platform, Comment, Ethics - Religion, Media, Online Media, Political Blogging, Politics, Review, Thinking
One thing worth pointing out is that draft versions of the guidelines had been in existence for up to a year before the Civil Serf incident and, by that point, the latest version was over 80 pages long. Tom Watson’s trick was to leverage the incident and force the officials that had been prevaricating for a very long time into action. He also cleverly involved active civil service bloggers in the radical editing down of what existed into what was published.
You’re right to say that they are principles rather than practice directions and, whilst I do think there is a need for the latter, establishing principles at the outset is of clear importance.
Thanks Jeremy, that’s interesting.
I think the blog advantage was to be able to go from “what about?” to “solution: bang” in about a week.
What are you doing now, by the way?
Well, that’s the edited short version of the story!
I’m living in south west Ireland being a house husband mainly Doing a bit of freelance work and, after a year away, just coming out of hibernation now. Its been good not to think about Whitehall too much but I find I am too attached to let go completely…
.-= Whitehall Webby´s last blog ..This parrot is not dead, its just sleeping =-.
Matt,
Thanks for writing on this (and linking to my post!). It’s interesting to read the outcome of the Civil Service exercise. I guess ‘principles rather than rules’ is especially what Pete Phillips is calling for in Methodism.
.-= Dave Faulkner´s last blog ..How Many Friends Can You Have? =-.
Worth noting, of course, the explosive growth of Twitter in the meantime. There remains a small core of bloggers inside government, and on its fringes; but many of those who were blogging have since abandoned their blogs in favour of frequent tweeting.
Personally, I’ve fought hard to keep my blog going. There seems to be less in the way of source material, and certainly my frequency of posting has dropped off a bit. Quite often, I find myself sending a ‘hey, look at this’ tweet, where I might previously have written a brief blog post. But to my mind, my blog remains by far the better way of ‘building a brand’, pushing an agenda, and making a difference.
.-= Simon Dickson´s last blog ..Government beefs up open source policy – a bit =-.
Simon>There seems to be less in the way of source material, and certainly my frequency of posting has dropped off a bit.
Is that perhaps because your business has moved out of its initial phase, and also that there are fewer new initiatives around near an Election, apart from window dressing?
All sorts of reasons really, both work and home-related – but I wouldn’t have said the evolution of the business was one of them, to be honest. If anything, I’m all the more determined to keep blogging as things progress.
I fully expected government work to dry up completely after Christmas; but I’ve already been asked to get involved with a few new projects – admittedly with much shorter turnaround-times than normal. And I’m scoping up some ideas to do some interesting things around the election. (I’ll say no more for now…)
Thanks for the comment Simon.
What do you think about Tweet Aggregator plugins as a new way of link blogging?
Not a big fan, to be honest – but then again, I was never a big fan of automated postings from Delicious.
.-= Simon Dickson´s last blog ..Government beefs up open source policy – a bit =-.
[...] was consulted (as Secretary of the Faith and Order Committee) but isn’t happy. Like Pete, Matt Wardman contrasts the lengthy Methodist document with the much briefer Civil Service guidelines, which concentrate on [...]